Category Archives: Consulting

April 17, 2015 · 9:04 am

Cooking On The Road

Foodie Friday, Myrtle Beach edition.  I’m on the annual golf trip with my buddies (our 21st, thank you) and as you might expect I get to do a good chunk of the cooking while we’re here.  That’s not a complaint.  This area has a serious lack of high-quality restaurants and over the years our group has figured out that staying  in and spending the money on high quality ingredients trumps paying for mediocre food dining out.  I certainly don’t mind cooking.  There is lots of willing and competent help here and those who can’t cook are eager to clean up the mess.  Perfect!

There is one thing I have learned over the years that actually is a pretty good business thought too.  If you’ve ever been on vacation and tried to cook in the rental’s kitchen you know that you are facing a serious challenge.  I think the same company puts the identical dull knives, glass cutting board, and crappy pans into rental condos everywhere.  I don’t mind the mismatched dinnerware nor the 2 slice toaster (ever made toast for 12 in a 2 slicer?).  I do mind the ridiculous – and dangerous – other equipment.  What do we do?

We bring our own.  A couple of good knives, a full-sized rubber cutting board, some serious BBQ tools, a large pot and/or non-stick pan with a lid can make all the difference.  It also requires some smart meal planning choices.  You have to accept that you’re going to stick to basics that don’t require a lot of pans and hopefully very few steps.  Roasted large cuts of meat and better than individual steaks and braises are better than sautes.  You plan your product based on conditions as well as your ability to support it.  Which is the point.

Different conditions, a changed situation means you need to plan ahead, figure out the appropriate resources, and adjust your strategy.  Doing hat you’ve always done and which has satisfied your customers in the past might not have a chance in the situation you’re facing.  No one starves on this trip – we eat quite well, actually – but I don’t even think about making the stuff I’d prepare at home in my fully stocked kitchen.  I don’t try to make it all perfect; I do try to keep the boys fed and happy.  You can think about that the next time the marketplace puts you in a strange business kitchen.

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April 10, 2015 · 10:01 am

Menu Boards

This Foodie Friday I’d like for you to think about menu boards.  We’ve all seen them as we dine out.  In some places they’re chalk boards, whiteboards in others.  Usually they contain a listing of the day’s specials but in some places the entirety of the menu is out there.   What always impresses me and makes me hopeful that I’m about to enjoy a really good meal are those places where the board doesn’t contain a lot of items and where there aren’t printed menus.  This tells me the chef is concerned with what ingredients were available that day and looked the best.  Sure, there are generally a few dishes that are the restaurant’s staples – dishes for which they’re known and/or their clientele has indicated they love by ordering them often.  But when you go back to a place and there are a half-dozen dishes that weren’t there the last time, it shows an attentive kitchen that cares about the food and the customers.

I’m bringing this up because the same thought holds for strategy.  We need to write our strategic thinking on menu boards and not on stone tablets.  Like the ingredients in a market, conditions change. The way consumers use media changes.  How they communicate with one another changes.  Our goals – and theirs – evolve.  Pouring through data may show us a new, underdeveloped audience.  Our budgets may grow or shrink.

Every one of those factors will require an adjustment to our planning.  Not making those adjustments is the equivalent of living with an outdated, printed menu. I always shake my head when I see a Caprese Salad on a menu in the dead of winter.  That dish is the essence of Summer and it demonstrates laziness and a disdain for quality.

Strategic plans are living documents and need constant tweaking.  Erasing and rewriting the board is a good thing, not a demonstration of vacillation about goals or tactics.  While it’s absolutely critical to establish a strategy — to know why you are doing what you’re doing and how you’re getting to those goals, it’s also critical to keep checking and adjusting.

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April 9, 2015 · 11:29 am

Signal To Noise

One term you might have seen when you’re looking at stereo systems is Signal To Noise Ratio. It’s exactly what you’d think – the relationship between the desired signal and whatever background noise is present. I like what Wikipedia has to say about a variation on the theme: 

Signal-to-noise ratio is sometimes used informally to refer to the ratio of useful information to false or irrelevant data in a conversation or exchange. For example, in online discussion forums and other online communities, off-topic posts and spam are regarded as “noise” that interferes with the “signal” of appropriate discussion.

Part of what we do as marketers and business people generally is to gather information. We listen (at least I hope you do) to all of the sources of data, especially social media. In theory this allows us to gain insight into the concerns of our customers, the opinions of our brand, and the actions of our competition. However, as it turns out, these social signals have a huge signal to noise ratio, at least when it comes to brands.

The folks at Networked Insights did a study for Fast Company.  You can read the results here but the fact that blew me away is that in some cases as much as 95% of the social buzz on Twitter about a brand was spam.  They defined spam as tweets from fake accounts, social bots, coupon offers, the brands themselves or celebrity endorsers – basically anything that isn’t a true consumer writing.  The categories most weighed down by spam are those in which consumers make a lot of purchases, such as shopping, finance and tech. Significantly less spam occurs in categories such as religion, sports and science.

Most importantly, the nature of the conversation changes dramatically when the signal to noise ratio improves as the spam is removed.  More granular and nuanced topics emerge from the background noise (spam) and you get a better sense of what really is important to consumers along with how they’re feeling.

It’s critical to listen.  It’s just as critical to do whatever you can to improve the signal to noise ratio so that you’re gaining valuable insights and not just more data.  That’s true whether it’s social, analytics (is your data filtering out bots, your own employees, etc.?) or any measure you use to make important business decisions.  Got it?

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